ACTFL 2019 post 1

I’m so excited to be in Washington, DC for ACTFL! It’s my first time at this national conference and I feel privileged to have the support of AATG, financially and in terms of tips and tricks to make the most of these three amazing days. Biggest takeaway from this morning’s meeting for the stipend winners — don’t forget to take breaks to rest, eat, and drink!

The plenary session is a lot like an early-morning rock concert, which is weird but fun. I’m proud that the teacher of the year is from New England! And I loved the message in her speech that it’s not bilingual speakers’ responsibility to make monolinguals feel comfortable in their ignorance. 

I’m so excited for this conference and I can already see that the hardest part will be deciding which sessions to attend. Here’s a picture of me just before the start of the plenary meeting. 

NHAWLT This Weekend

This weekend was the New Hamshire Association of World Language Teachers’ annual conference and I presented both yesterday and this morning. I don’t teach in New Hampshire anymore but I do live here and it was a nice opportunity to see some friendly faces and also get acquainted with some new ones. I spent a lot of the weekend hanging out with the German teachers who were well represented there, but I also managed to speak some Spanish as well. 

I was, frankly, not happy with yesterday’s presentation, which was an explanation (in German) of how I use fairy tales in my classroom. I love the topic but small details like the room I presented in being cramped and uncomfortable and my forgetting to set up animations on the texts of my slides messed with my mojo in presenting. 

I’m still glad I did it because fairy tales are really a worthwhile topic to discuss (and use!) pedagogically. They’ve gone through a sort of organic evolution of being entertaining and instructive, for one. Students are often familiar with the stories, or at least the traditional format of fairy tales. (I was shocked how many of my students weren’t familiar with Rumplestiltskin when I taught it last year! Is it one Americans don’t generally know?) Plus, they are reminiscent of childhood, which I find is a big draw for high schoolers. 

And there are so many good resources! I totally recommend Grimms Märchen ohne Worte to any teacher using fairy tales in the classroom, even if German is not your target language. It’s got beautiful, colorful illustrations of many beloved tales that make a great addition to students’ visualization of the texts. Other resources are specific to the target language, but some sites, like the German Project, have equivalents in other world languages as well. 

I’m proud of my fairy tale unit and especially the integrated performance assessment I wrote for it, but, again, I don’t feel I did a great job presenting about it. 

My second presentation, which was this morning, went a lot better, possibly because I had given it last year at the Vermont Foreign Language Teacher Association conference. I also gave it in English — such an easy language to present in! 

The topic was my favorite Comprehensible-Input friendly activities and, well, it’s fun to present about stuff I’m excited about. Sometime soon I’ll pick apart all the CI stuff I do piece by piece, but the highlights this morning were:

• explaining all the cool variations of pictionary I do in class. So fun!
• teaching teachers about Who Could Say as a way to review texts. That is a great one that not a lot of the folks I was presenting to were familiar with. 

All in all I had a nice time at the NHAWLT conference. Every session I went to was useful and engaging and I can’t wait to figure out how to integrate all the new stuff into my classroom practices. 

What I do instead of cleaning

I don't know about you, but I hate cleaning my house. Sometimes I say I don't notice mess as much as other people (e.g. my husband) but I think I've just gotten used to the mess because the thought of cleaning - or, worse, organizing - drives me crazy.

It's also a little crazy-making to have a mess, though. I feel guilty sitting around while the papers, books, and laundry (among other things) pile up. So, to soothe my guilt and the gnawing feeling that at my core I'm a terribly lazy person, what do I do? 

I work, of course. What could be more convincing evidence against laziness but hard work itself? Since I'm a teacher I don't get paid by the hour or based on my productivity or anything, but I do love my job, not only as an escape from other responsibilities but also as a creative outlet, a public service, and a way to keep my ardent love of languages constantly kindled.

I've tried blogging before and, honestly, it wasn't that successful. Because if you can write on a regular basis, you probably can also do your dishes on a regular basis. And I struggle with that. On the other hand, I thought it might be fun to catalogue what it is I'm doing with my time while I'm not cleaning. Hence, the messy part of my title.

I teach German and Spanish, but at my core I identify as a Latin teacher. In Latin, the word for (female) teacher is magistra. So here you have the beginning of a chronicle of what I do instead of cleaning up after myself: The musings of a Messy Magistra.